One of the odd things about the US program is that current astronauts not training for a specific mission and retired astronauts are given administrative jobs within the space program.

I've never understood how, for example, David Scott being an army pilot with an engineering degree and post-grad qualifications in Astronomy and geology qualified him for project management and HRM jobs but I guess when you have these highly qualified driven people sitting around you need to keep them occupied.

<blockquote>They need to be kept occupied or they'll degrade thanks to boredom. </blockquote>Either that, or they'll violently rape the rest of the human race just out of sheer ennui.Which is a different word for boredom, yes, I know.

While it would be entertaining see an astronaut go crazy in such a manner you can only imagine the media backlash: "Astronauts are violent killers!" "The astronaut in your midst!" "Schools allowed astronauts near children!" "NASA training evil psycopaths" and other such silly things

Giving astronauts admin jobs suits astronauts from both military and civilian backgrounds. In the military, the goal is to retire at the highest rank possible. Pilots are already junior officers, but if they make astronaut, they're no longer on a combat track (barring a revolt against the Terran Hegemony); they're staff officers. Staff officers rise by mastering the bureaucracy, becoming project managers, department heads, etc. And few astronauts fly until they retire. If civilian, they'll go back to the private sector at some point, similarly need to follow the management track.

It's not glamorous, but that's life.

@M echanist:

NASA-Johnson Space Center, where astronauts spend most of their professional lives, can be a hothouse. That macho, Right Stuff culture was still very much in evidence when I worked there (1986-1996). Also, it's a fairly conservative place. In some ways, it's like highschool, with the jocks at the top, except the jocks are also very smart, geeks are in the middle and the few cheerleaders are in the PAO (Public Affairs Office). It is (was) a somewhat insular culture, though some of us had friends from the oil company ghettos of west Houston.

So, yeah, some people can flip out now and then. A few years ago, a woman astronaut very publicly went nuts after ending up on the weak leg of a sexual triangle, and drove most of the way to Florida nonstop in order to pursue the woman she lost out to. She was pulled over in Georgia IIRC. She got fired of course. I hope things eventually worked out for her, though.

The astronaut program selects rigorously for physical and mental health, but I'm guessing until the above incident (which was years after I left), the psych evaluations tended not to allow for the pressure of life and work in the NASA-JSC bubble.

New Scientist reports on a review committee that's considering alternatives to the current back to the moon plan.

1. One idea is to refuel lunar and interplanetary missions in space using relatively small cheap rockets (which could be bought in from the private sector) to put fuel supplies into orbit. That'd radically reduce the size of manned spacecraft and get rid of the need for big new boosters.

2. The other idea I like is rather than going back to the moon or trying to go straight to a manned Mars missions NASA should undertake a series of less ambitious deep space missions that would build the skill base and tech base for an eventual Mars mission. This'd involve missions to Earth-grazing asteroids; a Venus fly-by and a mission to one of the Martian moons. The cost of these missions would be much lower than the Mars mission - you won't need a lander or a return stage and you could do a lot of valuable science. An asteroid mission might also lead to in-situ resource extraction which would transofrm the whole cost structure of space travel.

I like them both because together they imply a space infrastructure. The problem with Apollo and Constellation, if it flies, is that neither left (will leave) behind an infrastructure when the project is over. The ISS isn't really an infrastructure either. You can replace solar wings, radiators, and other bits, but once the core modules becomes unfixable you're kind of screwed. Hence the idea of just letting the whole works crash back to earth once the station's useful life is over. And that's a shame. On the other hand, some bits can be rebuilt around another core module (see "End of mission/deorbit plans") and used for another 10 or 20 years. But the station itself isn't a suitable staging area for manned lunar or Mars missions. At best it's a way station.

The next step should be a follow-on, more heavy-duty Space Station. Kinda boring I know, but maybe we could make it a big spinning double donut (mmm...donut) this time.

A presidential panel wrapping up a review of options for future U.S. manned space flight operations delivered a grim assessment today, showing NASA's current plan to retire the shuttle, finish the space station and return to the moon by the early 2020s is not even remotely feasible without a significant restoration of previously cut funding.

And I was out today and the words "space infrastructure" and "space architecture" kept going through my head.

NASA Launching IRVE Today. It goes in about 20 minutes, and you can watch it Here or at NASA's website. This thing is pretty neat; it's like a giant inflatable suit of armor for a rocket on re-entry. Mars landings have been difficult and used a lot of fuel as they have to use thrusters to decelerate and maneuver to a reasonably speed to land (crash) on the surface. The idea behind this is that it inflates just before re-entry, causing a huge amount of drag. The benefits of this is that larger payloads, rovers, and one day (potentially) crews can be landed safely with less effort and money. According to the article, the idea has been around for a long time, but only recent advances in materials technology are allowing us to actually test this.

I just looked it up, and the Wiki article on the Chinese space program seems to have been written by a particularly nationalistic Chinese person. There's no mention (as of right now) of there ever being any accidents or explosions in the program. But take a quick google search, and you find hundreds of news articles about recent explosions, mishaps, and deaths.

I wonder why nobody in Chinese or American politics is trying to cooperate with China in space. We have similar goals, similar reasons for achieving them, and anything that fosters good will and knowledge exchange is probably a good thing. It doesn’t seem like much of a security issue; China has had ICBMs capable of hitting almost any Earthbound target for decades and their unmanned rockets do a fine job launching intel satellites. Our combined space efforts with Russia seem to have gone well. Seriously, there must be something our nations could work together on.